Hendricks to celebrate 91st birthday at Jazz on the Maumee

Jazz legend Jon Hendricks rarely stops moving. Even when sitting, his toes tap, his heels bounce, his knees swing side to side. He sings as easily as he talks, often breaking off mid-sentence to sing a couple of stanzas or a full song before continuing with his thought.

Hendricks grew up in Toledo on City Park Avenue, five houses down from fellow jazz legend Art Tatum. The two were close friends, performing regularly with Hendricks singing and Tatum accompanying on the piano.

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“He was so incredibly facile,” Hendricks said of Tatum. “It was as though the piano was something he took out of his pocket and unfolded and stood up. It was like he invented it. There was nothing he didn’t know about it.”

Hendricks, who is considered the originator of the improvisional singing style vocalese, started singing as a young boy at the Erie Street church where his father was pastor. As a teenager during the Great Depression, he honed his skills at Stanley’s, a neighborhood hamburger joint, where he taught himself songs on the jukebox and sang them for customers.

“I had a good ear. I would stand in front of that jukebox all day long. After school I came and I stood there until supper and I learned every tune on the jukebox,” Hendricks said. “After a while, I got my nerve up and the next evening when a gentleman came to the jukebox, I said, ‘What are you gonna play?’ He said, ‘What business is it of you?’ I’d say, ‘Give me the nickel and I’ll sing it.’ And they’d say, ‘What?’ and I’d say, ‘Yeah!’ It was always seeing is believing.”

Hendricks credits much of his early music education to Tatum and the jukebox at Stanley’s.

“While I was learning those tunes, I was learning music, I was learning our culture, I was learning jazz,” Hendricks said. “My life for some years was between Art Tatum, Scott High School and that jukebox.”

Hendricks later toured the world with vocal trio Lambert, Hendricks & Ross and then as a solo artist. He returned to Toledo later in life. He now serves as a part-time professor of jazz studies at the University of Toledo.

Jazz on the Maumee

Hendricks, who turned 91 on Sept. 16, will celebrate with a performance Sept. 19 at Jazz on the Maumee. The series, launched in July by the Art Tatum Jazz Heritage Society, is held 5-7 p.m. every Wednesday in the Aqua Lounge at The Grand Plaza Hotel, 444 N. Summit St.

“Ninety-one. Ha!” Hendricks told Toledo Free Press during a recent interview in Toledo. “That’s how I feel. I think that’s the greatest joke. On me. That’s a joke on me. Boy, let me tell you, that is a joke. Ha! I never thought I’d get anywhere near here.”

Jazz on the Maumee offers a platform to highlight local musicians, said Kay Elliott, executive director of the Art Tatum Jazz Heritage Society.

“We love and appreciate all the local musicians and we wanted to give them another place to be showcased,” Elliott said. “There wasn’t anything like this Downtown and we thought it would be a great idea. It’s just a beautiful space. The sound is so good. You have to see it.”

Admission, which includes free valet parking and an appetizer buffet, is “a special birthday rate” of $10, Elliott said. A cash bar is available.

Also performing Sept. 19 will be Swingmania, a 15-piece jazz, swing and Big Band group. The Sept. 26 Jazz on the Maumee event will feature Hepcat Revival and admission will return to $15 or $10 for Art Tatum Jazz Heritage Society members.

Elliott said she hopes people come out Sept. 19 to see a living legend in person and help Hendricks celebrate his birthday.

Jon Hendricks. Toledo Free Press photo by Joseph Herr

“Jon is an incredible performer,” Elliott said. “He’s really extraordinary and has such wonderful energy. We’re thrilled because we’re the biggest supporters of Jon. All of Toledo supports Jon so much. Who wouldn’t be excited to have the legendary Jon Hendricks?”

Big names

From his humble beginnings in Toledo, Hendricks went on to rub shoulders with some of the great names in jazz, including Louis Armstrong, John Coltrane, Randy Weston, Charlie Parker and Joe Morello.

His friend Tatum remains one of his biggest influences.

“I think every jazz artist — and classical artist — oughta listen to Art Tatum,” Hendricks said. “He had no lines between one musical form and another. … For him, there was just music and all of it was the same.”

One of Hendricks’ favorite stories about Tatum is the time Tatum’s mother gave him a piano roll that played a piano duet.

“Being blind, he didn’t know it was two guys so he said, ‘I’ll learn it and play it for you when you get home,’” Hendricks said. “She got home and he sat down and played it. That was incredible. He was altogether incredible. There was nothing that wasn’t just incredible about him.”

“Dave, I’ve seen him go out to eat with his arrangement pad and and during dessert

and coffee he’d finish the arrangement. No instrument. Just finish it off. Incredible musician,” Hendricks said. “They were both incredibly talented.”

Hendricks laughed recounting a comment Armstrong made after listening to the trio perform their fast-talking vocalese style.

“Louis said, ‘Y’all sound like you have a mouthful of hot rice,’” Hendricks said.

Hendricks said people are often shocked to learn he can’t read music.

“I just hear the tune. I hear it and if I can hear it, I can write it. It just doesn’t affect me,” Hendricks said. “I never knew what I was doing. I never had any idea. Just play me a chord and I’m gone. I don’t know what’s coming out, but I know I have to follow these chords.”

Despite his talent, Hendricks almost didn’t become a professional singer. After being drafted and serving in Europe during World War II, he enrolled at UT, majoring in prelaw, but his GI Bill ran out before he finished the degree, so he moved to New York City to pursue a singing career.

“That was the best thing that could have happened to me,” Hendricks said.

He met his wife, Judith, at New York’s famous jazz club Birdland, where he was performing and she was working. Their mixed-race relationship — he is black and she is white — was shocking to many at the time, Hendricks said. They’ve been together 54 years and split their time between Toledo, New York City and France, where they have children and grandchildren.

Hendricks still loves singing and performing.

“A good reception from the audience, that’s what you work for,” Hendricks said. “You can sing anytime. If you play [an instrument], there are limitations to when you might play, but when you sing, you can sing anytime.”

He also loves working with students at UT, where he helps bring jazz alive for introductory classes like History of Jazz, said his teaching assistant Atla DeChamplain, a graduate student in jazz studies.

“Most of them aren’t music majors and we show a lot of black-and-white footage,” DeChamplain said. “They wonder why it’s relevent. They’ll be like, ‘Why do we care?’ Then he comes in and totally hooks them. He charms them. He gets them engaged and makes it real.”

At 91, Hendricks has slowed down some, but dismisses the suggestion of old age.

“Are you kidding? Shoot. I’m ready for 200. I tell everybody man’s ultimate stupidity is dying. I’m not gonna do it. I refuse. Especially just because someone says I’m 90. What the heck is that? That ain’t nothing. I’m not through yet. I’m not through at all.”

Stanley Cowell to play concert at TMA Peristyle

Playing a concert in Toledo is always special for Stanley Cowell. This time the pianist has two very different gigs lined up in his hometown — and he’ll share the spotlight at one show with his daughter.

Stanley Cowell

“Toledo has been very supportive of my career since the beginning,” Cowell said. “There is an appreciation there, and I always enjoy seeing old friends, and I hope I can continue to do them proud.”

Growing up in the Glass City, Cowell learned to read music by age 3, thanks to his sisters who played piano.

“[My sisters] took me to their teacher, Mary Belle Shealy, and she wouldn’t take me until I was 4 when my feet could reach the pedals. So I waited six months or so and went back and I could reach the pedals because I had long legs, and that began my formal study and I took to it.”

Oh, and there was that visit from Art Tatum.

“It was an indelible impression that [Tatum] slammed into my forehead and my ears by playing at my house when I was 6 years old,” Cowell recalled and laughed during a call from his Maryland home. “He and my father knew each other when they were kids, and he came by to visit.

“It was such powerful playing, it obviously affected me. Years later, it kind of rolled off the top of my head at a recording studio, where I was asked to do a solo number I had not intended to do. It was a trio recording, and I just started playing and the tape was rolling, and there it was, the piece he had actually played at my house, ‘You Took Advantage of Me’ by Rodgers and Hart.”

Cowell has played keys for Miles Davis, Stan Getz, Herbie Mann and others, and has numerous recordings as a leader and a sideman.

After a decade away from the recording studio, the respected composer was lured back by the chance to work with his daughter, Sunny.

“The record business has been really strange, and I kind of backed off for a while purposely, and I was focusing on education where I teach,” said Cowell, a professor and chair of jazz at Rutgers University. “I think that the progress my daughter makes when she approaches a project with me inspired me to want to go back to the studio.”

The recently released result: “Prayer for Peace.” Sunny is featured as a vocalist and violist.

“She’s a very consistent performer with surprises of her own,” Cowell said. “She’s a creative person and a natural musician even though that’s not her total focus at this point.”

“When I perform with my dad, I learn so much,” Sunny, a first-year law student at the University of Maryland, wrote in an e-mail during exam week. “He is critical but endearing when we practice and perform together.

“Although I always knew he had a lot to offer as both a professional musician and professor, I feel like I am finally at the age when I can appreciate and benefit the most from his extensive knowledge and experience.”

Cowell will perform with the Toledo Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Jeffrey Pollock at 8 p.m. Jan. 7 at the Toledo Museum of Art Peristyle Theatre. The concert will celebrate the orchestra’s upcoming trip to Carnegie Hall. Tickets are $20 to $60.

Cowell and his daughter will join bassist Clifford Murphy and drummer Renell Gonsalves for a CD release party at Murphy’s Place, 151 Water St., at 7 p.m. Jan. 8. Admission is $15 and includes appetizers.

Richardson: Art pianos

Last week, I attended a fundraising workshop at the Downtown Library presented by the Center for Nonprofit Resources. The training was very worthwhile and I learned some really valuable things about philanthropic giving. However, the thing that has stuck with me most vividly from that morning is solid evidence of my inability to focus on anything nonmusical when something musical is nearby.

On my way into the training, I passed by an art piano. I’m sorry, what? Did you say “art piano”? And to say that I passed by it is not entirely true. What I actually did was to circle around it and grin at it. I may have even talked to it and made little happy noises at it, thus making passersby uncomfortable, I’m sure. I even took pictures of it with my new fancy-schmancy phone. Are you ready for this? I even snuck back out of the training 20 minutes in because I needed close-up pictures and could not concentrate until I had them. This might be an illness.

Ask my colleague Rebecca Facey if I can listen to a word she says when we’re having lunch at Michael’s Bakery on the East Side while that wonderful man is playing jazz standards on the piano by the door. Her answer would probably be, “Only after she names that tune.” A room with a piano in it is an extra-special place. Particularly art pianos, which have been brought to us through a program by the Art Tatum Jazz Heritage Society. Thanks to this program these special places are all over Toledo. And thanks to this magical town that has peopled itself with talent-oozing citizens, there is usually someone around who knows how to play. My campaign to tell the world about the immeasurable creative force that is Toledo extends far beyond visual art.

There are musicians everywhere! And they are each contributing to the atmosphere of uniqueness and free expression that makes Toledo such a wonderful place to live. A lucky patron is one who happens to be at the Glass City Café when Ben Langlois gets the itch to play a couple of tunes on the Mardi Gras piano. Even One Government Center, a place that tends to make me a little nervous, is softened by the beautiful art piano in the corner of the main lobby. A little bird even told me that there is a man who works in Government Center who routinely comes to the piano on afternoons when he takes a break from his position in the city taxation department and plays softly and soothingly. My guess is that he feels very fortunate to have that creative outlet right there in his workplace, but imagine how pleasant that must be to encounter as just a person walking through.

During the summer, I fantasized about installing speakers in all of the trees in

Downtown so people walking around during the day would have a soundtrack to travel by. A lofty goal, I realize. It would have taken a lot of work to convince the city to help me out with this particular plan and I’m already bugging them enough with that whole domestic violence thing. Besides, we’ve got all of these pianos! The same County Administrator Bird who told me about the pianist who enriches the space in Government Center for himself and so many other Toledoans, mentioned that the building managers are considering removing that particular piano. My heart cracked at the very notion. Why on earth would anyone remove music from a place? My dad got me a tchotchke a few years ago that is a small, framed stitching in fabric that says, “Without music, life is a journey through a desert.” It’s on the windowsill in my kitchen and I look at it when I do the dishes. It never occurred to me that this wasn’t common knowledge.

It is moments like this when I swell with gratitude that I have this platform to say openly and to whomever is making this decision, please don’t take the art piano out of One Government Center. That would be a very un-Toledo thing to do.

Rachel Richardson is an activist, musician, co-founder and co-director of Independent Advocates, and a product of Toledo, Ohio. E-mail her at star@toledofreepress.com.

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Downtown Toledo

Art Tatum Memorial dedicated

The new Art Tatum Memorial for the music legend and Toledo native was dedicated at noon Sept. 11 at the Lucas County Arena.

The “Art Tatum Celebration Column,” sculpture is a 27-foot tower of spiraled piano keys with blue LED lights created by California artist Cork Marcheschi. He was selected from among 75 artists who submitted proposals to the Arts Commission of Greater Toledo, according to Adam Russell, public art coordinator for the group.

A. A. Boos & Sons, Inc. of Oregon, a general contractor on the arena project, donated the concrete base and installed the 27-foot steel column to support the sculpture.

The company also helped install other artwork in the arena in collaboration with Art Iron, The Lathrop Company, Mosser Construction and Toledo Glass & Mirror.

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on Friday, September 11th, 2009 at 3:04 pm and is filed under Community, Downtown Toledo.
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